New Yorkers deserve higher than Andrew Cuomo.
Zohran Mamdani and Brad Lander on the United Federation of Academics’ New York Metropolis Mayoral Discussion board in 2025.
(Michael Nagle / Getty Photos)
Although the Metropolis of New York has been working beneath that identify since 1664, it has been electing mayors solely since 1834. Cornelius Van Wyck Lawrence, winner of that first election, was a Democrat; so was Robert Anderson Van Wyck, the primary man elected by voters in all 5 boroughs. So had been many of the others, although the best man (regrettably, up to now they’ve all been males) to carry the workplace was undoubtedly Fiorello LaGuardia, who throughout his lengthy profession in nationwide and municipal politics ran on the Socialist, Republican, and Fusion get together traces.
LaGuardia’s instance reminds us that that is an workplace that, in the correct palms, can obtain exceptional progress—a truth simply forgotten in our current diminished circumstances. A historian must attain all the way in which again to Jimmy Walker, who resigned his workplace in shame in 1932, to discover a mayor who can match Eric Adams’s capability for residing massive and performing small.
Now, after 4 years of corruption and chaos, New Yorkers have an opportunity to finish Adams’s compromised tenure—and, in his place, select a mayor worthy of main the nation’s largest metropolis. On June 24, Democratic voters head to the polls to pick their get together’s nominee—a selection that, on this Democratic metropolis, is commonly tantamount to picking the following mayor. After they do, they’ll use a ranked-choice voting system that, if ballots are solid strategically, can ship a mayor who displays this metropolis’s progressive imaginative and prescient and values.
Present Challenge
New Yorkers are lucky to have two robust contenders who’re poised to fulfill this second: Zohran Mamdani and Brad Lander. Mamdani is a State Meeting member from Queens who has energized voters throughout town together with his disciplined, brilliantly executed, and genuinely inspirational marketing campaign. Lander is a housing advocate turned politician—a Metropolis Council member for 12 years, now the comptroller—whose lengthy file of progressive coalition-building and savvy policymaking has made town a fairer, gentler place.
Each candidates would make principled leaders—mayors devoted, wholly and with out compromise, to the welfare of all New Yorkers, to not their cronies, their careers, or their private consolation. Each can be fierce defenders of all residents in opposition to the predations of Donald Trump. And each would push a imaginative and prescient of New York that’s reasonably priced, inclusive, forward-thinking, and simply.
It’s for these causes that The Nation is endorsing the 2 of them, and urging New Yorkers to rank Mamdani as their first selection and Lander as their second.
When Mamdani introduced his candidacy for mayor, he was few folks’s thought of a front-runner. At simply 33 years previous, he was broadly dismissed as too left, too aspirational, too younger. But throughout his marketing campaign—and, for these paying consideration, his 4 years in workplace—he has proved himself the rarest of political skills: a politician whose means to speak, join with constituents, and articulate very important truths has the facility to energise and even mobilize.
And now right here he’s, main all the opposite progressive candidates within the polls and steadily gaining floor in opposition to the front-runner, Andrew Cuomo. He’s at present operating greater than 10 factors forward of Lander, and he’s raised more money (practically $1.4 million) from extra New Yorkers than every other candidate. Like Bernie Sanders’s two campaigns for president, Mamdani’s candidacy is constructed on the facility of small donors and enormous numbers.
It is usually constructed on a candidate whose temporary file of legislative achievement has been amplified by massive measures of ethical braveness and private charisma. In a metropolis the place unthinking and unstinting assist for Israel has lengthy been seen as a requirement for politicians, Mamdani is an outspoken supporter of the Palestinian trigger and a fierce critic of Israel’s operations in Gaza. His “Not on Our Dime” invoice would have barred tax-exempt charities working in New York from funding Israeli settlements within the occupied territories. Whereas it’s contemptible to smear Mamdani as an antisemite due to his Muslim religion or his criticisms of Israel, such a smear can be, given the New York media surroundings, predictable. Which makes his immense private attraction all of the extra vital. So, too, are his skills to construct alliances, and to remain the course—first demonstrated when he joined town’s taxi drivers of their 15-day starvation strike for debt reduction.
Constructing on his bases—his Astoria district, the Democratic Socialists of America, and town’s South Asian neighborhood—Mamdani has summoned a technology of in any other case disillusioned younger activists again to battle. However anybody tempted to dismiss him as a latter-day “Bernie bro,” or his supporters as merely “cool kids,” ought to check out the map of his donors, which reveals that his enchantment already reaches from Riverdale and the South Bronx to Bay Ridge and Sundown Park—and even into New Dorp and Nice Kills on Staten Island. It could not but add as much as a motion, nevertheless it already has the substances of a brand new city politics.
It helps that the problems he’s operating on—freezing rents for stabilized tenants, making all metropolis buses quick and free, and offering free childcare for working mother and father—have broad enchantment. It might be argued that the cash spent on sending free buses down Fifth Avenue could be extra successfully used to restore town’s rotting infrastructure. However whereas the main points could be debated, Mamdani’s disciplined give attention to cost-of-living points demonstrates a dedication to creating New York a metropolis that every one its residents can thrive in, afford, and even take pleasure in.
That’s a dedication that Lander shares—and one which has been the driving focus of his profession for over three many years. From his earliest days as the manager director of the Fifth Avenue Committee—a community-based reasonably priced housing group—Lander has been a devoted warrior in New York’s progressive trenches. A prescient critic of gentrification, he labored tirelessly within the Metropolis Council to counter the Bloomberg administration’s gilded imaginative and prescient for New York Metropolis—and he has been an efficient politician on causes starting from paid sick go away (which he acquired handed over Bloomberg’s veto) to fossil gas divestment. Crucially, he has at all times understood that the one solution to construct a extra progressive metropolis is to construct long-term energy—which is why he cofounded the Metropolis Council’s Progressive Caucus throughout his first time period.
On problem after problem, Lander has executed the work and put within the time. The proof is mirrored not simply in his previous coverage achievements but additionally in his campaign commitments—amongst them his promise to advance office equity and union energy by means of a Mayor’s Workplace of Staff’ Rights and his vow to declare a housing state of emergency that can allow town to construct 500,000 new, reasonably priced items. As a liberal Jew who has lengthy known as out Israeli apartheid, Lander has proven braveness and management on even probably the most contentious points. And his expertise as comptroller is arguably one of the best coaching for a would-be mayor.
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Crucially, throughout these first dramatic months, each Mamdani and Lander have proven actual boldness in opposing the Trumpian onslaught: After discovering that DOGE had grabbed $80 million from municipal financial institution accounts in February, Lander succeeded in pressuring town to sue the Trump administration. Mamdani has additionally stepped up, confronting border czar Tom Homan and demanding, “What number of extra New Yorkers will you detain?” Repeatedly, they’ve proved themselves to be among the many metropolis’s most dependable defenders.
Additionally they supply the clearest different to a different would-be strongman looming over town: Andrew Cuomo. Of all of the candidates, Cuomo poses the most important menace to the shared progressive imaginative and prescient that Mamdani and Lander have put ahead. But identify recognition and cash have made him the main contender. Sadly, it seems that extra folks keep in mind the previous governor’s reassuring every day press conferences throughout Covid than the 1000’s of New Yorkers who died in nursing properties due to his insurance policies—deaths that he directed his aides to cover up. Additionally they appear to have forgotten the dedication—by each New York Legal professional Basic Letitia James and the Biden Justice Division—that Cuomo abused his energy as governor by sexually harassing 13 girls. Each of those scandals make the previous governor unworthy of workplace; in actual fact, they make it essential to not rank him or Adams in any respect.
Happily, New Yorkers who want to fill out all 5 slots on their ranked-choice poll are fortunate to have further worthy selections so as to add to their roster, together with different three candidates who got here into The Nation’s workplace for interviews. Zellnor Myrie, whose give attention to reasonably priced housing and public security appeals to the considerations of working-class New Yorkers, additionally has a file of preventing for voting rights in Albany. Jessica Ramos has been a champion of town’s immigrants and has a powerful labor file within the state Senate. And Scott Stringer was a progressive comptroller with a streetwise savvy harking back to his cousin Bella Abzug. Whereas The Nation was not capable of converse with Adrienne Adams, her record of holding the line in opposition to the mayor as speaker of the Metropolis Council has received her respect.
Certainly, if there’s a lesson to be gleaned from this major season, it’s that the dream of a kinder, extra humane metropolis—one the place “the federal government’s job is to really make lives higher,” as Mamdani has mentioned—is robust amongst our elected officers. One other New York is feasible. On June 24, by voting for Zohran Mamdani and Brad Lander—and strategically rating Mamdani first and Lander second—New Yorkers have an opportunity to reclaim our beloved metropolis.
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